{"id":33974,"date":"2016-09-01T12:00:38","date_gmt":"2016-09-01T16:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=33974"},"modified":"2021-10-21T17:04:34","modified_gmt":"2021-10-21T21:04:34","slug":"final-fantasy-x-part-11-the-sphere-grid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=33974","title":{"rendered":"Final Fantasy X Part 11: The Sphere Grid"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yuna goes off to marry Seymour and leaves the party behind to mope and worry. Eventually they discover the recording where Jyscal accuses his son of murder from beyond the grave. Nobody has really been a fan of this whole marriage idea to begin with, but they didn’t have the right to forbid it. But now that they know Seymour is guilty of both patricide and Maestercide, they assume that Yuna is in danger. This is all the justification they need to storm the temple and break up the couple with their own special brand of sword-pokey justice.<\/p>\n

How does he sleep with those branches of hair in the way?<\/div>
How does he sleep with those branches of hair in the way?<\/div><\/p>\n

They do this to “protect Yuna”. Seymour is guilty of killing a Maester, wanting to destroy the world, and That Haircut<\/i>, all of which are crimes that should be punished by death. So it’s somewhat ironic that when our heroes bring him to justice, it’s for a crime he wasn’t going to commit. Yuna isn’t in any danger from Seymour, because Seymour needs her alive for his plan to work. I mean, she’s still in danger because completing her pilgrimage will kill her, but Seymour isn’t planning to kill her before<\/em> that.<\/p>\n

When the party arrives, Yuna is in the chamber of the Fayth and Seymour and his goons are waiting outside. You would think that someone responsible and level-headed would open up the conversation. Maybe Lulu should say something, or (better yet) Auron. But for whatever reason, brave clueless Tidus shoves to the front of the group and appoints himself spokesman. Here is how he chooses to do that, which is verbatim from the game:<\/p>\n


\n

I never realized it before, but in this one particular room Seymour's outfit is perfectly colored to act as camouflage.<\/div>
I never realized it before, but in this one particular room Seymour's outfit is perfectly colored to act as camouflage.<\/div><\/p>\n
\n

FADE IN:<\/p>\n

INT. Macalania Temple. Day.<\/p>\n

We see a large chamber that seems to be made entirely of teal(!?) stone. Tidus, Lulu, Wakka, Kimahri, Auron and Rikku enter. They find Seymour and his stupid haircut standing watch by the ornate door to the inner chamber, along with a couple of dorky-looking goons.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Tidus:<\/h4>\n

(Shouting.)<\/em> Seymour!<\/p>\n

Seymour:<\/h4>\n

Please be silent. Lady Yuna prays to the Fayth.<\/p>\n

Tidus:<\/h4>\n

(Continues shouting.) MAKE ME!<\/p>\n

(An EPIC STARE-DOWN takes place. We get closeups of Seymour and Tidus. Neither one says anything. Tidus spends several long seconds saying NOTHING about Seymour killing Jyscal, the imagined danger to Yuna, or Seymour’s ghastly haircut. After several seconds of staring where you start to wonder if your Playstation maybe locked up, the door to the inner chamber RUMBLES open and Yuna steps out.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Tidus:<\/h4>\n

(Still shouting for some reason.)<\/em> YUNA!<\/p>\n

Yuna:<\/h4>\n

(She sees her friends have followed her and makes another one of her RIDICULOUS LITTLE GASPING NOISES.)<\/em> But why?<\/p>\n

Tidus:<\/h4>\n

(Still shouting in his shrill little voice.)<\/em> We saw Jyscal’s sphere!<\/p>\n

Auron:<\/h4>\n

(Suddenly remembering he’s the only adult in the entire room, he addresses Seymour.)<\/em> You killed him.<\/p>\n

Seymour:<\/h4>\n

(Smugly.)<\/em> What of it?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

These outfits. How can anyone in this scene have a straight face, much less work up the will to fight?<\/div>
These outfits. How can anyone in this scene have a straight face, much less work up the will to fight?<\/div><\/p>\n

This confrontation is both the release of a long-built -up frustration, and yet at the same time sort of sad and awkward. Eventually Yuna joins her friends and the two sides get around to trying to kill each other.<\/p>\n

\n

Audience:<\/h4>\n

Friggin’ FINALLY.<\/p><\/div>\n

During the fight Seymour calls Anima, the same Aeon he used to save the Blitzball stadium<\/a> in such spectacular fashion. Anima has a huge, well-telegraphed attack that will wipe the party. Protip: Call an aeon to absorb that blow.<\/p>\n

While the heroes are busy killing Seymour for the first time, let’s take this opportunity to talk about the OTHER hateful source of misery in Final Fantasy X…<\/p>\n

The Sphere Grid<\/h3>\n

Never has so much interface complexity concealed so little interactivity.<\/div>
Never has so much interface complexity concealed so little interactivity.<\/div><\/p>\n

The sphere grid is our leveling system in this game, and it has a lot in common with the temple puzzles. There’s colorful things and nice music to sooth you, there’s tons of busywork, and despite all the fussing around it’s actually pretty shallow and dull.<\/p>\n

It works a bit like a board game. You’ve got markers on the board representing each party member. Each piece is on a nominally linear path. Each point on the path contains some bonus: A couple of points of strength, or some agility, or more hitpoints, or magic, or whatever. Every few battles, your characters will gain another move on the board. You can then move their marker forward and grab the next bonus.<\/p>\n

To do this:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Open up the sphere grid and select the character you want to advance.<\/li>\n
  2. Push the button to bring up the popup. Select “move”.<\/li>\n
  3. Nudge the cursor to the next point on the track. Hit select. Watch an animation of the character’s marker moving to the new space.<\/li>\n
  4. At the confirmation popup, select “ok”. Hit select. Now you’ve moved your character into place.<\/li>\n
  5. Bring up the menu again. This time select “use”.<\/li>\n
  6. It will bring up your inventory of spheres. You need to select the appropriate sphere for this node. Strength and hitpoint nodes need power spheres, agility and evasion require speed spheres, magic power and magic defense require mana spheres, etc.<\/li>\n
  7. Hit the select button and watch a quick animation of the new node lighting up. Congratulations, you’ve just become very slightly more powerful.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The problem is that all of those steps and all of that busywork is completely pointless. There was only one thing you could do: Activate the next node. There were no decisions for the player to make. No tradeoffs to consider. Nothing to optimize. No benefit to delaying upgrades. (Except that it’s more convenient and less time consuming to do these in bunches.)<\/p>\n

    This shows the ENTIRE sphere grid, which holds the tracks for all characters. Taken from the FFX wiki.<\/div><\/a>
    This shows the ENTIRE sphere grid, which holds the tracks for all characters. Taken from the FFX wiki.<\/div><\/p>\n

    It’s not that this system needs to be simplified. It’s that there is no reason for the system to exist at all<\/i>. Instead of making me do all that busywork to get +2 strength when I make a move on the sphere grid, the game could simply give me +2 strength when I gain the level. Yes, that would be sad and boring, but adding a bunch of pointless busywork doesn’t fix that. It just means that leveling is sad, boring, and<\/i> a hassle.<\/p>\n

    Yes, there are a few decisions to make. Very occasionally the path branches off and you can choose which way to go. But meaningful branching choices might come along once or twice for a character during the entire course of the game. The game makes you do hundreds and hundreds of level-ups, when really only a tiny fraction of those moves offer you any choices. And even those “choices” are pretty shallow. Go one way if you’re doing what 90% of all players do, and go the other way if you’re doing something crazy and messing around with the late-game leveling mechanics.<\/p>\n

    Every character gets a different path, and every path zig-zags around in crazy circular patterns. This makes it feel<\/em> like you’re doing something interesting, but in reality you’re just plowing through layers of pointless menus. You’re not even making decisions.<\/p>\n

    Programmer Chad Birch actually untangled the sphere grid by straightening out the linear paths. You can see the result on his site GameInternals<\/a>. It reveals that – despite the winding path your character might follow during the game – it’s an overwhelmingly simplistic track with very little for the player to do.<\/p>\n

    Poor Kimahri<\/h3>\n

    Kimahri knows Kimahri is useless. This makes Kimahri sad. Poor Kimahri.<\/div>
    Kimahri knows Kimahri is useless. This makes Kimahri sad. Poor Kimahri.<\/div><\/p>\n

    The one decision you get to make is what to do with Kimahri. Every character in the party has a dedicated role: Lulu handles elementals. Auron’s sword cuts right through the armored stuff. Wakka’s ball can hit flying foes that your melee users can’t reach. Tidus gets lots of turns and usually comes up first in the rotation, letting you pre-empt dangerous foes before they wreck the party. Yuna can heal and call in Aeons to handle the really big stuff. They’re each positioned at the start of a long path on the sphere grid, and if you simply follow that path they’ll get better at doing their intended job.<\/p>\n

    But Kimahri doesn’t have a dedicated role. He starts off in the middle of the sphere grid and can jump on the path of anyone else. That sounds interesting. You can make him a second Tidus or another Auron or a backup LuluAlthough he can’t ever summon Aeons like Yuna, or use a ranged weapon like Wakka.<\/span>. But he’s going to spend the first dozen or so moves getting into position. So by the time he starts down the Tidus path, Tidus will be far ahead. Which means Kimahri will just be a crappy Tidus.<\/p>\n

    So you can only turn Kimahri into a crappy second-rate copy of one of the other characters. Which means that when you need that character you can either use the original and get the job done quickly, or bring in crappy Kimahri and do the job half-assed. Which means you’ll use Kimahri less often. Which means the other characters will get more XP, and more levels, and more moves on the sphere grid, thus expanding the delta between Kimahri and everyone else. Thus making Kimahri even more useless so you’ll be even less likely to use him.<\/p>\n

    You can fix this by deliberately using Kimahri despite his initially inferior stats, and by grinding to keep him on the same level as everyone else. That’s nice for poor Kimahri so he can feel useful. But it doesn’t really help the player, who is trying to optimize their progression. Because the optimal way to progress is to ditch Kimahri’s redundant ass and use the character who was designed for the job.<\/p>\n

    I wouldn’t mind. There are seven characters in this game, so there’s plenty of room to have an “extra” character that only exists for the purposes of doing unconventional builds. But the question of “What do I do with Kimahri?” is one of the very few choices the sphere grid offers you, and it turns out the most convenient answer to the question is, “Nothing. You don’t really need him.”<\/p>\n

    Anyway, let’s get back to that boss fight…<\/p>\n

    See Ya, Seymour!<\/h3>\n

    He might be a creepy genocidal megalomaniac, but when Seymour drops dead he knows how to splay out for a spectacular death-pose.<\/div>
    He might be a creepy genocidal megalomaniac, but when Seymour drops dead he knows how to splay out for a spectacular death-pose.<\/div><\/p>\n

    Seymour drops dead, and a bunch of important Guado people show up at the WORST POSSIBLE MOMENT. Tidus confesses to them murdering Seymour BEFORE explaining why, which kind of gets the whole conversation off on the wrong foot.<\/p>\n

    Yuna tries to send Seymour, but the Guado won’t allow it. They don’t care if Seymour killed his father. Seymour runs a pretty tight cult and everyone here is loyal to him. Yuna and her party are branded traitors and they have to make a run for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Yuna goes off to marry Seymour and leaves the party behind to mope and worry. Eventually they discover the recording where Jyscal accuses his son of murder from beyond the grave. Nobody has really been a fan of this whole marriage idea to begin with, but they didn’t have the right to forbid it. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[612],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-retrospectives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33974"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53105,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33974\/revisions\/53105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}